Mirthful mondegreens

A green spirit strikes today, heralding spring and St. Patrick’s Day. This week’s blog is devoted to the art of the mondegreen, a product of faulty hearing and our human nature to sing the wrong lyrics for years, even when they don’t make any sense. The term was coined by American writer Sylvia Wright in a November 1954 issue of Harper’s Magazine, when she described mishearing the final line of the first stanza from the 17th-century Scottish ballad, “The Bonnie Earl O’ Murray.” The stanza goes as follows:

Ye Highlands and ye Lowlands,
Oh, where hae ye been?
They hae slain the Earl Amurray,
And laid him on the green.

But whenever Wright heard the song, it sounded like:

They hae slain the Earl Amurray,
And Lady Mondegreen.

Wright recognized that hers was a common failing, falling into a category of folk custom that had no name. So she dubbed them mondegreens, and a new form of misheard-lyric poetry emerged. As a longtime, chronic mondegreener, I’ve butchered my fair share of songs. Among them:

In Steve Winwood’s “While You See a Chance,” there’s a line: “When some cold tomorrow finds you, when some sad old dream reminds you,” that I always sang “…when some sad old me reminds you.”

When belting out the Ike Turner part in “Proud Mary,” I used to sing “pumped a lot of Tang down in New Orleans,” instead of “pumped a lot of tane down in New Orleans,” until I realized he meant pumping gas (octane) and not that sweet orange-powdered astronaut drink.

My Rhode Island-centric nature caught up to me when the Red Hot Chili Peppers released “Scar Tissue.” The song used to blare on the speakers at the old Fitness Depot in Plymouth, N.H., where I worked out for years. I kept hearing the phrase, “Young Pawtucket girl in a push-up bra…” Why would the Chili Peppers be singing about a young Pawtucket girl, I wondered to the point of obsession. Until I finally bought the CD and read the lyrics, when it turned out that they were actually singing about a “Young Kentucky girl in a push-up bra,” which made a lot more sense.

What song lyrics have you misheard over the years?